JFK and the Rise of the Neocons, Pt. 1

I would like to begin this multi part part essay by harking back to the book and mini-series The Untold History of the United States. One of the singular achievements of that Peter Kuznick/Oliver Stone project was its delineation of how American foreign policy changed when Franklin Roosevelt passed away. This is a point that, in historical terms, is hard to underestimate. But for whatever reason, the issue is largely ignored in history textbooks and by the MSM.  In my view this is not being true to the facts. To their credit, Kuznick and Stone did not ignore it.

Roosevelt’s foreign policy team consisted of himself, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and from 1936-38, his ambassador to the USSR, and Belgium, and later Hull’s special assistant, Joseph Davies.  Davies did not think that the USSR was a real threat to the United States. And in 1943, Roosevelt sent Davies to Moscow to try and arrange a private meeting between Josef Stalin, Roosevelt and Hull. (Elizabeth K. Maclean, Diplomatic History, Vol. 4 No.1) The former ambassador was surprised at how much anti-Soviet hostility there was in the State Department at this time.  After all the Soviets were critical allies against the Axis Powers.

In addition to this, Roosevelt wanted to make anti-colonialism part of the Atlantic Charter.  (Kuznick and Stone, p. 98) FDR’s belief was that the allies could not fight a war against fascism without working to free native peoples from a brutal and backward European colonial policy. (Ibid, p. 112) At a press conference he specifically attacked English colonialism in Africa.  He said that for every dollar they put in they take out ten: it was nothing but pure exploitation of the colonized peoples. (ibid) Roosevelt told Hull there would be a transfer of colonial empires to independence  after the war. (ibid)  Part of the policy was that France should also get out of Africa, and not go back into Indochina. About this last, the president said the French had been there for the better part of a century and the people are worse off now than they were then: “The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.” (Kuznick and Stone, p. 112)

Concerning Iran, Roosevelt declared, “The policy of the US toward Iran is to assist in the creation in Iran of a government based upon the consent of the governed….” (Memo from Patrick Hurley, FDR’s emissary in Iran, 12/21/43) As Robert Dreyfuss and others have pointed out, Winston Churchill did not like this since, as a prime mover in charge of the British navy, England relied on cheap Middle Eastern oil to run its fleet. (See also Anand Toprani, Oil and the Great Powers, p. 31) Churchill once replied about the topic that “British imperialism has spread, and is spreading, democracy more widely than any other system of government since the beginning of time.” (Note from Churchill to FDR, 5/21/44) I think, for instance, Gandhi would have disagreed with that. In fact, as Tariq Ali has written, “Imperialism was Churchill’s true religion….a belief in and promotion of racial and civilizational superiority.” (John Newsinger, Catalyst, 9/20/22)

Roosevelt considered his Big Three meetings as the beginning of a post war alliance between America, England, Russia, and later China.  But he warned at his last Cabinet meeting, “…the British were perfectly willing for the United States to have a war with Russia at any time…to follow the British program would be to proceed toward that end.” (Kuznick and Stone, p. 119) As we will see: Roosevelt was correct on this point.

As most of us know, the conservatives in the Democratic Party did not want to keep Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s vice president for the election of 1944.  They did not like Wallace’s overt populism, his hope of working with the USSR, his championing of minorities and labor unions and his advocacy of decolonization in Africa and Asia. (Kuznick and Stone, p. 138) They knew they could not dethrone FDR, but they thought they could get rid of the bottom of the ticket. As Peter Kuznick notes, Wallace’s enemies included “Wall Street bankers and other anti-union business interests, southern segregationists, and defenders of British and French colonialism.” (ibid) The British intel chief in America, William Stephenson, assigned RAF officer and future writer Roald Dahl to spy on Wallace. He sent back reports that Wallace wanted to roll back British, French and Dutch colonial empires throughout the Pacific.  When Churchill read these reports he could barely believe them. Wallace then learned that the British were applying force to get him off the ticket. (Kuznick and Stone, p. 138) Stephenson made it clear to his contacts in the American government that his country would not be happy if Wallace repeated as Vice President. Stephenson was frank on the issue:

I came to regard Wallace as a menace and I took action to ensure that the White House was aware that the British Government would view with concern Wallace’s appearance on the ticket at the 1944 president elections. (ibid)

Stephenson was a powerful force in the British hierarchy and he maintained offices at Rockefeller Center in NYC.

As Wallace was traveling around Central and South America, his enemies were steeling themselves for an effort to neutralize his candidacy. The active plotters were  led by oil magnate and party treasurer Edwin Pauley, the namesake of Pauley Pavilion at UCLA. (Ibid, p.139) Before removing Wallace, they spent time choosing a man who would replace him; this turned out to be Harry Truman. (Ibid, p. 140) To say Truman was not really ready to assume Roosevelts’ legacy is much too mild; and this key issue has been concealed by the historical establishment and the MSM to a significant degree.

Truman was a product of the corrupt Pendergast Machine in Missouri. He had failed in three businesses, including a haberdashery. In 1934 Pendergast chose to run Truman for a senate seat. When he was asked: Why Truman? Pendergast replied that he wanted to demonstrate that a well-oiled machine could send an office boy to the senate. (Ibid, p. 141)

Before he passed on, Roosevelt had only two meetings with Truman in three months. (Robert Dallek, Harry S. Truman, p. 16) FDR did not even brief Truman on the Manhattan Project. And he certainly did not tell him about his vision of cooperation with the USSR after the war.  Within ten days of his death, at Truman’s first meeting with Stalin’s foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, Roosevelt’s policy was overturned.  Truman was so ignorant of what came before him that he accused the Russians of breaking agreements, about which he had no knowledge. For instance, the Churchill/Stalin agreements on Eastern Europe which mapped out spheres of influence there. (Kuznick and Stone, p. 115) When Davies heard about this U-turn meeting,  he met with Truman and tried to inform him of what Roosevelt’s policy had actually been and how the Russians expected reciprocity with spheres of influence. (ibid, p.124)

But with FDR only a memory, and Cordell Hull retired, Davies was now marginalized.  A militant anti-USSR contingent formed around Truman, partly made up of Truman’s friend from the senate Jimmy Byrnes, new Secretary of State Ed Stettinius and, as Roosevelt had predicted, Winston Churchill.  They convinced Truman to continue his hard line toward Russia and to use the atomic bomb.  In fact, in a matter of weeks, Truman thought Stettinius was too mild, moved him to the UN, and replaced him with an unqualified  Byrnes. One could argue that this was the real beginning of the Cold War.

As many military men have observed, e.g. Dwight Eisenhower, Georgi Zhukov, Douglas MacArthur, Chester Nimitz-- there really was no need to use atomic weapons against a defeated Japan.  But when General Leslie Groves sent a report to the president about the success of the Trinity test it elated Truman and Byrnes, who were about to meet Stalin at Potsdam. As Churchill noted, this report changed Truman’s demeanor, he now commandeered the proceedings. (Kuznick and Stone, p. 163) Strategically, what it did was to preempt the agreed upon invasion of Japan from the west, which Roosevelt and Stalin had agreed upon at the Yalta Conference. The fact that FDR had agreed to this as a complement to Operation Downfall--the American invasion of Japan from the east--seems to indicate that he was not as eager as Truman to use the atomic alternative.  This likely emanates from his vision of cooperation, not competition, with Stalin after the war. In fact, the need to defend Truman on this horrendous decision has led people like MSM historian David McCullough into serious intellectual problems. (See Philip Nobile’s article, “The David McCullough Nobody Knows” at History News Network.) As Christopher Nolan accurately depicted in his film, when Robert Oppenheimer visited Truman at the White House, he told the scientist that Russia would never develop the atomic bomb.  To say Truman was wrong does not begin to estimate his miscalculation.

As Roosevelt predicted, it was Churchill’s ambition to wreck his post war vision, and to jump start a battle between Moscow and Washington.   Little did he know that Truman was going to help him. In March of 1946, in Fulton Missouri, with Truman sitting right behind him, Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech:  “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.” The fact that Truman escorted Churchill on a train ride in his home state so Churchill could make that speech now broke the Cold War into a gallop that was pretty much unstoppable.

In Indochina, Truman again reversed Roosevelt’s policy about France reentering  into Vietnam. In February of 1950, he and his then Secretary of State Dean Acheson, condoned the French attempt to bestow upon Bao Dai administrative powers in Vietnam. Acheson said this was backed by countries of the world “whose policies support the development of genuine national independence in former colonial areas…”

This was nonsense. It enraged Ho Chi Minh. He understood that it symbolized that America would now overtly support the French attempt to occupy Vietnam with Bao Dai as their mandarin. Which is what happened about three months later. France asked for financial aid and military equipment in this endeavor, which they got. As the Pentagon Papers notes, this was the beginning of the US involvement in the war.  Later that year the US set up a Military Assistance Advisory Group in Saigon to aid the French. (Pentagon Papers, Volume I, pp A-7, A-8)

It should be added that a year after, in 1951, Truman approved Paul Nitze’s NSC-68, a scare paper, which vaulted the Cold War into stratospheric heights, beyond George Kennan’s 1946 containment policy. Most historians consider that document to be a complete exaggeration of the aims of the USSR, mainly because Nitze, unlike Kennan believed in rollback.  It even included the following: “The issues that face us are momentous, involving fulfillment or destruction not only of the Republic but of civilization itself.”

Let me give the final word on this monumental issue to a man who had a front seat at the event. When author Robert Sherwood interviewed Churchill’s advisor Anthony Eden, he criticized both Truman and Churchill in ways that could have harmed his future aspirations. So he asked Sherwood not to print his comments until after his death. Eden said that the horrible turning point of the whole Moscow/ London/Washington relationship stemmed directly from the death of Roosevelt. He told Sherwood about FDR’s remarkable and subtle ability to handle the Russians, and the massive respect they had for Roosevelt. He concluded that if Roosevelt had lived and “retained his health he would never have permitted the present situation to develop…..Roosevelt’s death therefore was a calamity of immeasurable proportions.” (Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances, pp.1- 2)

If you ever wondered why Republican hacks like George Will and Condi Rice like Truman, this is the reason.

In Part 2: Kennedy Excavates Roosevelt